Many times during our development duties we have to read through code segments to figure out the desired intent of a feature. Today I was doing just this. There is a new feature that I need to implement and to do so, I needed to walk through a bunch of code to determine where my changes may...

Over the past 2-3 days there has been an uproar over at the altnetconf list. Oops, I meant the cli_dev list. This uproar is because of a single action. Changing the name of the list. Some would like to argue that the name of the list is not important. That the name of the list is simply an 'ID'...

Recently I was asked about backing in unit tests into an existing project. In particular I was asked A) was possible and B) is it worth it. In short my answers to both these are Yes and Yes. However, backing in unit tests is not without its challenges. I thought today I would go express my experiences...

In my last post I think I struck a cord with some people in my post 'Unit tests taking too much time'. My intent was NOT to sound like an elitist Agilist or any else of that nature. My intent was simply to put a post out there about the misperception (in my opinion) about how writing unit tests...

At our most recent .NET users group meeting, Joe Healy asked for a show of hands for those doing Continuous Integration. There were about 40 of us and (I'm pretty sure) no one raised their hand. A few years back, I had a NAnt script that was scheduled to execute nightly (you could also call it manually...

We finished our second sprint today. In fact, I just left the Sprint Retrospective Meeting (which was actually quite brief). We've been very lucky to have a client that insisted on using Scrum to manage the project. Before this I only had a cursory knowledge of Scrum. We are a small shop, and while...

What do you do when you are writing a test for a piece of code that calls out to an ‘out of your control’ service such as a web service or email server? If you are like most of us, you simply allow your test to make the call and ‘hope’ that the service is up. However, this is really bad. Having your...

Have ever wanted to use a concrete class as both the the PluginFamily and Plugable (information on StructureMap's attributes here ) type in StructureMap ? I know I have, just today in fact (not the first time, but thought I would post about it this time) I needed to do just this. Why would I want to...

Jeremy always has something insightful to say, and this is no exception. Check out his TDD post about newbies on projects. http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2007/07/22/you-re-a-tdd-newbie-on-a-project-team-with-jeremy-what-do-you-do.aspx BTW, If all project leads/managers had this same...

Today I finally had to create a mock of a web service proxy, what fun. Of course the first go at it failed because I did not think about the fact that the web service proxy is NOT serializable. This sucked, so what was I to do. Well, fortunately for me web service proxy classes are partial’s, so I am...

We were recently contracted to assist a development team in employing some Best Practices . Specifically, they were interested in learning Agile. We began by speaking with the developers and managers to try to determine what would benefit them the most. We were only given three weeks to teach/guide/coach...

Over the past few months I have really started to believe in the use of Mocks. When I first started using mocks, I started with NMock (mostly because that is what we had at work). Shortly after that I started playing around with Rhino Mocks at home. Since I have been playing around with both frameworks...

Last month I'm focusing almost only on Continuous Integration. Number of hours spent on that subject allows me to pretend be advanced. So far all my CI experience was limited to CruiseControl.NET (95%) and a bit of Team Foundation Server. A problem with setting up CI using TFS is well known and there...